After updating from Xcode 5 DP2 to DP3 I found that several storyboards in my iOS project could no longer be opened, and would also prevent the project from building, with an error like:

The document “MainStoryboard_iPhone.storyboard” could not be opened. Could not verify document content.

Interestingly it did not affect several storyboards which hadn’t been touched in awhile, and for those exhibiting the problem some trial and error revealed that deleting the table view inside certain view controllers fixed it. Of course, recreating table contents with all of the layout and segue intricacies is not ideal so I poked around further using Open As Source Code and noticed that the suspect tables had become tableViews inside a viewController (versus tableViewController) which was now failing verification.

I’ve actually run into this problem before when a developer manually added a UITableView to a plain UIViewController, either by accident or because they changed their mind partway through the design, and saw unintended side effects. But in this case it seems to have started out just fine and been mangled by Xcode 5 somewhere along the way. In any case, using Open As Source Code and manually changing the involved XML tags fixes the problem, allows Xcode 5 DP3 to open the storyboard, and most importantly preserves all the content without deleting anything or disabling auto layout.

If you’re seeing this error without the scenario above there may be other similar problems that now fail Xcode validation which are also solved by a quick fix in the storyboard XML. I’d recommend deleting scenes or objects in the storyboard until things work, then add back a new/empty version of the object causing the problem, compare source, and if it’s a simple fix then revert and update the XML yourself similar to above.

Great, thanks for this. I suspect the original issue for me was a bug in DP1 or DP2 as this is where the storyboard was created and even after failing to open in DP3, dropping back to DP2 allowed it to open fine.

In my case it was a collectionViewController that was missing the ‘collection’ bit….

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